Two 12-year old girls from Waukesha, Wisconsin allegedly stabbed a third in the woods on May 31 in an attempt to become "proxies" of the fictional Slenderman, a creepy and otherworldly Internet meme. The girls claim to have learned of Slenderman from the Creepypasta wiki, a site that collects paranormal and horror short stories.

The two girls lured the third into a game of hide-and-seek in a park, according to the criminal complaint. On the way to the park, one of the girls displayed a knife. The victim was stabbed 19 times in her chest, legs, and arms, and then allegedly dragged into the woods to bleed to death. She managed to crawl out of the woods and flag down a passing cyclist to get help.

Slenderman, who is depicted as a faceless man in a suit with a thin frame and unnaturally long, occasionally tentacle-like arms, originated on the Something Awful forums in June 2009 from Eric Knudsen (username Victor Surge). Knudsen fleshed out the character with text as a mysterious character who entices and abducts children.

Slenderman grew in popularity through fictional works that used his character, and it became a popular subject for cosplay. Despite the fact that Slenderman isn't part of an official published body of work by the original author (though it is not a public domain character), it's a popular subject of stories on sites like fanfiction.net.

The character has become so well-known on the Internet that it has become the occasional subject of parody stories that undercut its paranormal vibe and treat it as a cliché. Still, the character has a loyal following, including a body of "proxies" called "the Collective" that has given itself a backstory of "existing at the time of World War II in the 1940s, and most likely much longer before then." Internet forum commenters often claim Slenderman sightings, and photoshopped images of Slenderman leering in the background of otherwise innocent pictures abound.

According to the Slenderman wiki, "proxies," the role that the 12-year old girls suspected of the stabbing were allegedly trying to achieve, help Slenderman by manipulating victims, destroying or faking evidence, and carrying out tasks. The sources for Slenderman material are diverse, and there are no canonical "rules" of the Slenderman universe. The Internet has made Slenderman into virtually whatever its fans want it to be, so the process of becoming a proxy is vague.

That said, CNN reported that the stabbing was committed to "climb into [Slenderman's] realm." According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, one of the girls, Morgan Geyser, told the other, Anissa Weier, that "they should become 'proxies'… and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him." Most Slenderman paraphernalia on the Internet doesn't suggest that killing or harming someone else is a prerequisite to anything involving Slenderman, though it is something that proxies in the stories are expected to do.

Geyser also claimed that she had to perform the attempted murder or "[Slenderman] would kill [her] family." The two girls had allegedly formulated two earlier plans to kill their victim, the first involving duct-taping her mouth and then stabbing her neck and the second involving killing her in a park bathroom with a convenient drain for blood.

The Journal-Sentinel reports that before leaving to attempt the murder, Weier and Geyser packed a backpack of clothes, granola bars, and water to walk to Slenderman's mansion afterward. Geyser told a detective afterward, "It was weird that I didn't feel remorse." Geyser claimed the Slenderman followed her and that it could read minds and teleport (common features to the Slenderman lore).

Waukesha County district attorney general Brad Schimel told the Journal-Sentinel that due to the violence of the crime, he would try to bring the case in adult court, where the girls could each get up to 65 years in prison. If convicted in juvenile court, they can't be held longer than the age of 25.

Site administrator Sloshtrain posted to Creepypasta Tuesday defending the site but also warning its users that its content is not real life. "Only a small minority of people (mostly newcomers) on the wiki (and the Internet) truly believe what they read here," Sloshtrain wrote.

He continued, "Something like this was bound to happen... This is an isolated incident, and does not represent or attribute the Creepypasta community as a whole. This wiki does not endorse or advocate for the killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult."

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston